Emilie Taylor-Brown

Dr Emilie Taylor-Brown holds a first class honours BSc in Biology and English, an MRes in Humanities, and a PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies. With a starkly interdisicplinary background, Emilie is interested in the intersections between literature and science, and in particular how this relationship shapes cultural understanding.

She was awarded her PhD from the University of Warwick in 2016, with a project entitled ‘Miasmas, Mosquitoes, and Microscopes: Parasitology and the British Literary Imagination, 1885-1935.’ Following this, she took up an Early Career Fellowship with the Institute of Advanced Study at Warwick, and she is now a postdoctoral researcher on the European Research Council funded Diseases of Modern Life project at St Anne’s College, Oxford.

Influenced by contemporary developments in microbiome research, her current project, provisionally entitled: ‘Possessing Our Own Bodies: Gastric Health in Victorian Culture’, explores the many and changing perspectives on digestive health throughout the nineteenth century. She is particularly interested in models for understanding human-microbe relationships, connections between digestive health and emotional wellbeing, and the ways in which narratives of gastrointestinal imbalance dovetailed with emerging narratives of modernity.